Self-professed pages-haver George R.R. Martin recently responded to a comment on his blog about whether The Winds Of Winter, the long-awaited followup to 2011's A Dance With Dragons, will actually come out this year. The penultimate book in the Song Of Ice And Fire series, the source material for HBO’s hit show about incest Game Of Thrones, was initially slated to come out three years ago and despite a cavalcade of rumors, there is still no firm release date. On his blog, GRRM said “I’ve made progress” and claimed “I think it will be out this year. (But hey, I thought the same thing last year).” That’s not the most encouraging sign from an author who routinely claims to have pages that nobody ever sees, but you take progress where you can find it.

Alas, probably not. As manyfans have noted, GRRM has a stockpile of old material that’s been cut from books or serves as in-universe history. The old pages might be a new Dunk and Egg story (probably not!) or a piece of already-written, yet-to-be-published Targaryen family history from a potentially upcoming book Fire and Blood (we can speculate about that one after my man finishes books six and seven). The new old pages could be anything, but they are most certainly not The Winds Of Winter, which Martin is supposedly still working on, though we have yet to see pages.